


it looks ugly, but it's clean (oh mama don't fuss over me)

by apocalypsepoet



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Angst, Eddie Kaspbrak Loves Richie Tozier, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, he loves him !!!!!, i dont have much motivation to keep writing at the moment, its supposed to be a fix-it fic, so!!! much!!!!!!, this is the first five pages of a fic i started to write but
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:54:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23193532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apocalypsepoet/pseuds/apocalypsepoet
Summary: The realization that he’s in love with his best friend doesn’t hit him suddenly, or forcefully, or all at once.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 4
Kudos: 44





	it looks ugly, but it's clean (oh mama don't fuss over me)

**Author's Note:**

> so like the tag says, this is the first five pages of a wip thats been sitting in google docs for literal months and i just really want it out into the world so here

The realization that he’s in love with his best friend doesn’t hit him suddenly, or forcefully, or all at once. It’s not like a movie where the guy is oblivious to his best friend’s affections up until the last five minutes and then he is running through the airport because said best friend cannot get on that plane and leave him forever, at least not without telling her he loves her first. No. The only sudden realization he has, is that he already fucking _knows_ he’s in love with Richie. It’s forceful in the way that it’s the only thing Eddie can think about now. It’s—all at once—consuming, exhausting, wonderful, wrong.

They’re 13 and it’s 1989 and Richie is a _boy_ and it’s _wrong_. 

It’s the first time in his whole life that he actually feels sick. That maybe his mother is right and he’s ill and needs her to take care of him. He retrieves his fanny pack from where he threw it away—while Bill sliced palms open in a circle with a shard of glass just crawling with diseases—and silently wishes it’ll cure him. Maybe the spray of flavored water will soothe the burning in his stomach threatening to climb up his throat, choking him on a lack of oxygen that only exists in his mind. He takes a puff of the inhaler and pointedly _doesn’t_ think about the two letters he saw when he walked across the kissing bridge, dirty fanny pack in bloody hand. He goes home.

Beverly has moved away, Bill too. Stan’s packing up his room. His friends are leaving, forgetting, and the pain is agonizing. Their loss hurts. Each time Eddie says goodbye to another loser, a piece of his heart breaks away. They leave gaping holes in his chest—holes he knows will never heal unless—until—they remember each other once more. They scab over but he tears them open again and again, hoping that one will bleed enough that his friends will have to remember. But the wounds don’t bleed, not like the cut on his palm, or the sink in Bev’s bathroom, or the marks on Stan’s cheeks. Sometimes he wishes it would. It would give him something to fix. Because Eddie hurts. Losing them hurts him in ways Pennywise never could. And It has definitely hurt him. The leper haunts dreams he can’t remember; something about a dime just out of reach as he wakes, disappearing into daylight. More and more each day, however, Eddie’s beginning to see the leper as something else entirely. Something dirtier than the ooze it threw up, and something far more threatening. Which is why, he reasons, he’s kept the truth of his feelings from Richie. Losing his friends, it’s awful, it’s painful. But Eddie does what he does best, he bandages himself up each day, cleans his wounds carefully, and puts on a brave face for the few that are left. Losing Richie, though? Losing him to the truth? A truth Sonia Kaspbrak reads aloud each morning from the crisp newspaper hot off the press; a truth rooted in the fears she trained her son to have: disease and death. But Eddie knows his greatest fear of all is Richie Tozier walking away from him in disgust and shame, and never coming back. That’s something no plaster cast or neat stitches or morphine drips could ever fix. 

Eddie resigns himself to love his best friend from a distance, which, to be honest, isn’t all that far. Richie is too affectionate for his own good. He’s always been so comfortable with touch; it’s something Eddie envies. Richie is fearless, so expressive and loving, and Eddie envies that. 

He envies couples on the kissing bridge, declaring their love to each other, more. Because he’ll never have that. Not in Derry, and not with Richie. But he can pretend that those initials were carved for them, and he can pretend that it’s okay to love your best friend the way he does in Derry.

Nothing changes between them. It can’t. It won’t. Eddie refuses to let it. He loves Richie, has loved him for a long time, and it changes nothing. Because to be by Richie’s side, even as nothing more than a best friend is so much more than Eddie could ask for. Especially when the rest of his friends forget, move away, move on. Especially when any one of them could have actually died in the summer of ‘89. 

Eddie carves an ‘R’ into the kissing bridge, and hopes that it’ll be enough.

◇

Richie is on vacation, so it’s just him and Mike for a week in ‘94, and Eddie can no longer keep it to himself. Richie is leaving Derry, like the rest of the losers, and Richie will forget them—forget Eddie—just like everyone else did. Letters from Ben stopped coming only three weeks after his truck pulled out of the driveway to follow his parents to Virginia. Bev visited twice that first summer she moved away, her memory foggy, but then school started back up and they haven’t seen her since. Bill never wrote. Stan called him once in 1991, at two in the morning in a panic-induced haze. He may have forgotten, but his muscles did not; his fingers flying over the numbers before he could stop and think about who would even be on the other end. And that’s how, startled awake from the ringing, Eddie found himself talking Stan down from a nightmare while they teetered on the edge of sleep. He told Eddie he was sorry for waking him; that he loved and missed him. It was just like that summer. It was like he never forgot, and in the morning he’d meet Eddie at the corner where their streets met and they’d bike to the Barrens or the quarry and he’d roll his eyes at the infamous _RichieandEddie_ bickering and everything would be alright. But Stan left and forgot and nothing is alright. Eddie cried until the sun began to rise and kept the phone call to himself. He knew he’d never receive another.

He hoped that Richie wouldn’t leave. Prayed to whatever higher power his mother so devoutly believed in. But then it’s May and graduation is at their fingertips and Richie barrels into him on the way to the clubhouse, acceptance letter in hand. 

“California?”

“West coast, baby.” His smile is so wide, beautiful and mesmerizing, that for a moment, Eddie is glad. But then the realization that Richie is leaving hits him (sudden, forceful, all at once) and then he is smiling to hide the truth that his heart is breaking right in front of his best friend (liar, wrong, broken) who will soon be on the other side of the country. Opposite coasts. Never to be heard from again as the curse of Derry, or the fucking clown, or their own fucking luck, takes Richie away. Eddie is losing Richie anyway, truth be damned.

Richie is leaving the following week, and it’s breaking Eddie in ways he cannot even try to put into words, and that’s how he finds himself blurting out his best-kept secret, in a cornfield, to Mike. Eddie looks up at the clouds drifting above, wishing to be one of them. 

“You know that’s okay, right?”

“No, Mike. I really, really don’t.”

“Eddie,” Mike starts.

“No," he interrupts. "I feel so fucking wrong all the time Mike. I’m a liar, I’ve been lying to my best friend for years! But if I tell the truth, he’ll hate me! And I’ll just be sick and dirty and broken and, and—” Eddie chokes on a sob he didn’t even realize he’d been holding in for four years. 

Mike—sweet, wonderful, kind Mike—rests his hand on Eddie’s back, and lets him cry. And then he whispers something even a cursed town couldn’t make him forget.

“Love— _real love_ —can never be dirty, or wrong, or broken. And he could never, _ever_ hate you.”

◇

That’s the single thought he has as he awaits his bride at an altar made of fool’s gold.

_Wrong wrong wrong wrong it’s all wrong they’re gazebos they’re all wrong wrong wrong—_

“I do.”

◇

The realization that he’d once been in love with his best friend hits him like the taxi he wrecked when Mike called him two days ago. It’s sudden, and forceful, and all at once, and it sounds like a gong vibrating the floor of a fancy Chinese restaurant. It’s like every bad romantic comedy on the Hallmark channel Myra made him watch with her. One second, Eddie is sitting at the table, oblivious, trying to remember the name of the annoying kid with the giant glasses, and the next, Eddie is jumping out of his seat, ready to run through an airport for reasons even he can’t fathom. Not at first thought, anyway. It’s a realization that knocks the breath from his lungs. It’s sudden in the way he finally grasps his name. _Richie_. Like a sigh, a whisper. _Oh_ , he thinks, _there you are._ It’s forceful in the way that he is now conscious of his every move toward his long-lost best friend. (Lips falling open with an inaudible gasp while Richie uses only his mouth to take a shot. Palm sweating as he grabs Richie’s hand in a match of strength. Voice uncontrollable as he quietly shouts “let’s take our shirts off and kiss!”) It’s all at once encompassing and excruciating and overwhelming and _right_. 

They’re 40 and it’s 2016 and he is _dying_ and it’s all fucking wrong. It’s not how it’s supposed to be. He should be stopping Richie in an airport, not bleeding out in his arms.

Just the curse of Derry, or the fucking clown, or their own fucking luck that ruins it.

“I fucked your mom.” _Really? For fucks sake Eddie. Way to blow it._ Huh _. Blow—_

_Blow you for a dime._

_–wait, was it actually a leper or just some guy with an STD?_

_Eddie-bear, you’re sick but I’ll take care of you–_

_—Tozier sucks cock!_

_I don’t want you hanging around that Tozier boy, Eddie-bear. He’s…dirty–_

_–turn that comedian off, you know I hate him..._

_Hey Eds!_

_–they’re gazebos!_

_You’re still a loser, but you’re my loser, Spaghetti Man!_

_Eddie, look at me! Look at me._

_—we can still save him! Eddie!_

_Richie—_

◇

When his life flashed before his eyes the first time, it was all the terrible bullshit he’d put up with all his thirteen years of life. But then there was Richie, grabbing his face and knee—gently; always so gently—pulling his eyes away from the monster about to most definitely eat them, and Eddie sighed. He remembered how safe he felt in that moment, how warm and cared for and loved he was. And now here he is, Richie grabbing his face in both hands, palms slick with blood, _his blood_ , pulling his eyes away from the monster, away from the gaping hole in his chest, making Eddie look at him and only him. Eddie felt protected and loved. He felt seen. 

Suddenly, Eddie remembers every moment of his missing youth in excruciating detail; his life flashing before his eyes a second time. The memories of long summer days and cool nights full of bad dreams force their way up and out of their grave and all at once Eddie’s greatest fear had been realized as he watched Richie drive away for the last time twenty years ago, and now destroyed by an iron fence post sailing through the air. He would never lose Richie, because Richie was okay, he was safe and alive and begging him to stay awake, crying that he’d be right back, that he’s got to go kill that fucking clown. And he does, and they do, but Eddie’s already dead and he hadn’t assessed the risks in saving Richie because _no_ theoretical risk could outweigh his fear of loss. It’s a slightly altered gaping hole in his chest, but Eddie is okay with that. It’s one he knows how to take care of.

Not telling his best friend that he loves him, though, is his one regret.

**Author's Note:**

> let me know if you want the rest of it! ily all :*


End file.
